Month: December 2007

A LOT has been made of Greenland’s ice melting. I mean, a LOT. National Geographic ran an in-depth article about just how bad man has destroyed Greenland just about a year ago. Some snippets to give you an idea just how bad it is. The headline itself starts you off:

Global Warming: Greenland: When It’s Hot

And they don’t slow down from there:

Since Steffen established Swiss Camp 16 years ago, much has changed. Global warming has evolved from an obscure concern of environmentalists to a headline-grabbing motion picture–inspiring crisis of staggering proportions. Due to something called the polar amplification effect, Greenland is heating up at an exponential rate and has become a kind of barometer for the rest of the planet. What happens here in the next ten years will answer key questions about how much the Earth will warm in the next hundred. That is why there were more scientists out on the ice this year than ever before—the United States’ National Science Foundation alone helped fund 144 researchers, three times as many as in 2000. They’re all scrambling to track the tremendous changes while working against the narrowing window between winter storms and a melt season that turns the cap into a slush field mined with scientist-swallowing crevasses.

Only one problem tho. It is now becoming evident, THROUGH SCIENCE, that the warming of Greenland may have nothing to do with man at all:

The newly discovered hotspot, an area where Earth’s crust is thinner, allowing hot magma from Earth’s mantle to come closer to the surface, is just below the ice sheet and could have caused it to form, von Frese and his team suggest.

“Where the crust is thicker, things are cooler, and where it’s thinner, things are warmer,” von Frese explained. “And under a big place like Greenland or Antarctica, natural variations in the crust will makes some parts of the ice sheet warmer than others.”

What caused the hotspot to suddenly form is another mystery.

“It could be that there’s a volcano down there,” he said, “but we think it’s probably just the way the heat is being distributed by the rock topography at the base of the ice.”

That article in Livescience was not written by Robert Roy Britt. Apparently he doesn’t read the articles that don’t support is opinion. I doubt you’ll hear any sigh of relief from Al Gore’s bunch either.

Now, at the risk of being insulted and taunted, I again will ask the same question I’ve always asked. How much of the climate change in Greenland is actually man’s fault? Apparently quite a bit of the fault lies with Earth.